Yesterday, Piotr Otręba asked on the Radical Open Access mailing list for themes and plugins to use WordPress as an Open Access Repository. I also spent some time on this question and answered with this message: „I used annotum in the past to run journals as a test, but it is outdated, http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2011/06/30/annotum-publishing-with-wordpress-soon-coming-to-a-journal-near-you/. As far as I see, there are unfortunately only several plugins that simulate some repository functions in parts, e.g. ScholarPress Coins, Enhanced Publication, OAI-ORE Resource Map. However, these have very few users, so it is difficult to say how reliable and sustainable they are. Perhaps a crowd funding campaign for a wordpress-repository theme/plugin might be an option …“

This morning I read another answer (from Mathew Arthur, Co-Editor in chief and WordPress-publisher of the Open Access journal Capacious) which is a kind of late Christmas gift. Mathew describes in detail (and by using many screen shots) the necessary adaptations to run a scientific journal using WordPress, which fulfills expectations technically as well as organizationally (peer review) and is at the same time much more flexible than OJS. Here is a quote from Mathew’s message: „Using WordPress with only a few plugins (…) and filters in the theme functions.php file, the Capacious platform includes a robust online article submission, revision, and online publishing architecture. Each submission entity is tracked throughout review, editorial, and typesetting processes all the way through to publication and each article and all its associated blind review comments, edits, and assets are accessible from an intuitive administrative dashboard. Article pdfs are generated dynamically from the same submission entity and assigned a digital object identifier (DOI).“ The Google Scholar indexing also seems to run smoothly.

There is almost always something to improve and maybe this also applies to these WordPress adaptations, but there may be interest in working together to address any improvements. In consideration of the frequent questions to me about using WordPress as a journal platform, I would be pleased.

Stockholm University Library has monitored gold and hybrid publication charges (or Article Processing Charges APCs) for Open Access publishing at Stockholm University. The results are published on OpenAccess.se in a short posting by Lisa Lovén and Liisa Hänninen.

The University of Stockholm has spent 2.967.093 Swedish Krona (SEK) between January and August 2017 for APCs. Of this total, 60% were paid for Hybrid Open Access APCs and 40% were paid for Gold Open Access APCs. The data show that these four publishers have received more than half of all paid APCs, 1.662.896 SEK:

Lisa Lovén and Liisa Hänninen comment this as follows (translated by the author of this article): „The results reinforce the image that has been reported so far, both nationally and internationally, and show that the commercial approach of Elsevier and Wiley is top of the league, long before anyone else“

Similar concentration effects can also be found in Germany (see slides 9 to 13 of this presentation), where in 2016 49.59% of the APC payments reported by the OpenAPC project went to Springer Nature, Elsevier, and Wiley. If one considers frontiers as part of Springer Nature, the share increases to 55.5%.

Toby Green published an article dealing with new impulses for Open Access. The starting point is the success of Sci-Hub. First, he explains his key points:

„Sci-Hub has made nearly all articles freely available using a black open access model, leaving green and gold models in its dust“

„Why, after 20 years of effort, have green and gold open access not achieved more? Do we need ‘tae think again’?“

„If human nature is to postpone change for as long as possible, are green and gold open access fundamentally flawed?“

„Open and closed publishing models depend on bundle pricing paid by one stake-holder, the others getting a free ride. Is unbundling a fairer model?“

„If publishers changed course and unbundled their product, would this open a legal, fairer route to 100% open access and see off the pirates?“

He notes that the success of Sci-Hub and Guerilla Open Access proves that Open Access Gold and Green Open Access failed. According to Green, the unbundling known from aviation could strengthen Open Access: „In the traditional airline industry model, to get to B from A, one used to purchase a ticket, which covered the cost of a travel bundle: you were carried, fed, watered, entertained, and could take as much or as little baggage as you wanted. Today, led by low-cost airlines, the product has been unbundled: food, drinks, seat allocation, baggage, changing tickets, and even the way you pay are now being priced as extras to the core service of getting you to B from A.“

From the conclusion: „I suggest that we might be encouraged by the airline industry and unbundle the product. This would make all content free to read, answering the plea that the results of publicly funded research be available to the public, reveal the true values for the existing bundle’s component parts, and lead to a situation where each stakeholder has the choice to pay for the particular benefit they get from the scholarly communication process. This might prove to be a fairer, cheaper, more sustainable, and less controversial model in the long run.“

From the posting: „The OpenAIRE EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot is pleased to announce a new call for bids, this time to support open access publishing initiatives (see definition below) that intend to experiment with sustainable funding models alternative to author facing article/book processing charges (APC/BPC, hereafter referred to as ‘author fees’). The first call was focused on facilitating technical improvements for existing OA journals and platforms (the results are available in this final report)

With this second call, we want to acknowledge the efforts that are being made, within the OA publishing landscape, to develop, pilot, and apply business models other than author fee based ones. We want to support ongoing and new initiatives that put an effort in investigating or experimenting with sustainable and scalable alternative business models. We want to support both start-up initiatives during the planning and launching stages and/or publishing initiatives that want to transition from one business model to another. We also welcome Research & Development initiatives, provided that the results will be made public and reusable.

As this call is embedded within the OpenAIRE project, all eligible initiatives will have to prove that a number of FP7/H2020 publications will be published by it. The total budget available is € 200 000.“

Today Elsevier published its vision of Open Access, written by Gemma Hersh, and suggests a route that is neither green nor gold, but a mixture of it, one could say blue Open Access: Articles published by European institutions should be available Gold Open Access within Europe and – if deposited on a repository – Green Open Access outside of Europe. It is also made clear that Elsevier’s Gold Open Access will be expensive.

These are some of the key statements:

As about 80 percent of all journal articles are still published in Closed Access journals, Green Open Access will remain an important Open Access strategy.

Elsevier considers Europe „a region where a transition to fully gold open access is likely to be most cost-neutral“. According to Elsevier this is not the case for „other research-intensive countries such as the US, China and Japan“.

Elsevier suggests that for Europe it would be recommendable to „enable European articles to be available gold open access within Europe and green open access outside of Europe.“ Somehow in the mentioned green-golden mixture.

Referring to a paper of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) Elsevier continues to explain „that average APCs would need to rise to fund the infrastructure currently paid for via the 80 percent of articles published under the subscription model. In any event, APCs are likely to be higher than they are today even just accounting for inflation and the continuing global growth in research output, which is currently about 4 percent a year.“

Furthermore, funding for global Gold Open Access would also have to replace subscription revenues from commercial enterprises or other non HE-institutions. According to Elsevier, these account for 25% of the income in the Cosed Access model.

Elsevier also emphasizes the transitions costs in a mixed Gold Open Access and Closed Access era: „In a world where more than 80 percent of articles continue to be published under the subscription model, any country that moves to gold open access first would need to pay to broadcast its articles while also continuing to subscribe to the rest of the world’s content published under the subscription model if they want to retain access to articles published elsewhere (and not supported by gold OA).“

The core message of the text summarizes all this and sheds light on the further price development to be expected by Elsevier: „We [Elsevier] believe that the primary reason to transition to gold open access should not be to save money“.

The Open Access Policy of the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN has been published in October 2014 and was updated some weeks ago. It now requires not only all CERN physics results to be published Open Access but also instrumentation articles. The posting on the CERN’s homepage mentions even mentions Open Access instrumentation journals:

On August 1, 2017, 9,621 journals were listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).Only 32 publishers published more than 20 of these journals and thus have a quantitatively significant influence on Open Access. PLOS can not be found among them, but still has influence – more qualitative than quantitative.

These 32 publishers publish 2,950 journals, which are 31% of all journals listed in the DOAJ.

At this date, the DOAJ reported 7,474 publishers, thus 0.43% of all DOAJ-listed publishers produced 31% of the journals.

For more information please see the data deposited on Zenodo: Herb, U. (2017, August 2). Publishers of journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). http://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.838022